Yours and Mine

Laurisa White Reyes

You were moving to Ecuador for a job
and offered your belongings, curios a life collects

while living. But I had trinkets of my own
no one wanted. Then you drove to the gun club,

rented a pistol, and punched a peephole
through your skull. The parts of you

no one wanted—your thwarted dreams
and brittle fears—mopped up, discarded.

Later, those same possessions I rejected
(thread-bare Levi’s, books with broken spines,

tools with tags still on) were packed in boxes
and bequeathed to Goodwill, where strangers

picked through the remnants of you
like crows on road kill. And in the paper:

“A 39-year-old man”— where even your name
was omitted. These holes, then, clotted with regret

were all you left behind.

Laurisa White Reyes is the author of four published novels and the Editor-in-Chief of Middle Shelf Magazine. Her poems have appeared in Camas: Nature of the West, The Northridge Review, Writers Journal, and Welcome Home.